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Author Topic: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.17.1  (Read 56976 times)

Offline Skybreaker

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #45 on: April 25, 2022, 04:22:08 pm »

Offline Nord

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #46 on: April 26, 2022, 03:05:04 am »

Strange. You researched only Wizard, and no other mages. Capture them, interrogate them and you will be happy. :)

Offline Skybreaker

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #47 on: April 26, 2022, 12:12:29 pm »
Strange. You researched only Wizard, and no other mages. Capture them, interrogate them and you will be happy. :)

I did research the Outcast mage completely. The only other mages I have seen are Wizards and the Priestesses or something like that.

If you are thinking of Rune mage, which I did see is a requirement for runes, that is a no go as I have seen none in my game. I thought they were a late-game enemy after wizards.

To be fair there is a good chance I'm just blind and missed them. Which faction do they accompany? The ones I have encountered so far are goblins, orcs, pirates, legionaries and footmen.

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #48 on: April 26, 2022, 06:09:52 pm »
I did research the Outcast mage completely. The only other mages I have seen are Wizards and the Priestesses or something like that.

There's spiritualists too (they're the ones that look like ethereals), thunder priests, and fire priestess + fire servant.

That said, I have now researched "pyrokenesis" the blurb of which implies it's a spell but no idea how to use it.

On the other hand, my "spells" page on the ufopedia lists "psi-pulse" (from "savage psions" it seems) and "blizzard" (from the frost demon apparently) . No pyrokenesis on there (it's under "XCOM Research". And no idea how to use any of these either.

27% research
« Last Edit: April 26, 2022, 06:14:32 pm by xcommie »

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #49 on: April 26, 2022, 06:13:36 pm »
Excellent job Nord! Some bugs/feedback:

* antidotes seem to be pointless. Except maybe one mission, never had a soldier get poisoned. They just die same-turn.

* There's a bug with the Revolver Shotgun. Sometimes you fire and nothing happens. It takes the TU's but there's no sound, not hitting anything, and nothing gets set on fire (incendiary ammo, but also happens with stun ammo). Happens maybe 1 in 20 shots?

* Only the main base can research "special" technologies, i.e. Reports, pyrokenesis, etc. Nothing to transfer to the secondary research base.
Edit: I got "report: Queen of the nest" from a mission and transferred it to my secondary base: still couldn't research it

* Koas moving make the walking sound. I think the floaters do too.

* I got a "shaihulud overview" from a goblin shaman (it's in my ufopedia). Then shaihulud's come along and I can now research both the autopsy and the live specimen. Sure enough, when I research the corpse, nothing pops up. - attached save - base: "2 - Russia"

* My main base has a large detector. Shouldn't that be a large radar?
« Last Edit: April 26, 2022, 08:05:42 pm by xcommie »

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #50 on: April 26, 2022, 07:40:57 pm »
Attached save; right next to "Shota Baratashvili" there's an invisible unit. You can only see it from one angle. Even trying to walk into the square doesn't find it. It's to the square directly to the left, adjacent to the door. One of those flying things.

Offline Nord

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #51 on: April 27, 2022, 04:13:39 am »
To be fair there is a good chance I'm just blind and missed them. Which faction do they accompany? The ones I have encountered so far are goblins, orcs, pirates, legionaries and footmen.
They can be encountered with Feudals and Legion. But i'll check it, maybe there must be more of them.
On the other hand, my "spells" page on the ufopedia lists "psi-pulse" (from "savage psions" it seems) and "blizzard" (from the frost demon apparently) . No pyrokenesis on there (it's under "XCOM Research". And no idea how to use any of these either.
You can use pyrokinesys by any battlemage. When you gain one.
Excellent job Nord! Some bugs/feedback:
Thanks
Quote
* antidotes seem to be pointless. Except maybe one mission, never had a soldier get poisoned. They just die same-turn.
Maybe later?
Quote
* There's a bug with the Revolver Shotgun. Sometimes you fire and nothing happens. It takes the TU's but there's no sound, not hitting anything, and nothing gets set on fire (incendiary ammo, but also happens with stun ammo). Happens maybe 1 in 20 shots?
It is not a bug, just all pellets missed and fly out of map, without hitting anything. Engine limitation.
Quote
* Only the main base can research "special" technologies, i.e. Reports, pyrokenesis, etc. Nothing to transfer to the secondary research base.
Edit: I got "report: Queen of the nest" from a mission and transferred it to my secondary base: still couldn't research it
Read ufopedia. You need HQ to research important projects.
Quote
* Koas moving make the walking sound. I think the floaters do too.
Thanks, will fix.
Quote
* I got a "shaihulud overview" from a goblin shaman (it's in my ufopedia). Then shaihulud's come along and I can now research both the autopsy and the live specimen. Sure enough, when I research the corpse, nothing pops up. - attached save - base: "2 - Russia"
Normal thing.
Quote
* My main base has a large detector. Shouldn't that be a large radar?
You build it? In one version was a bug with starting base, i forgot to remove test facility. Normally, you have no radars on gaame start.
Attached save; right next to "Shota Baratashvili" there's an invisible unit. You can only see it from one angle. Even trying to walk into the square doesn't find it. It's to the square directly to the left, adjacent to the door. One of those flying things.
Normal effect. Purple smoke blocks vision.
« Last Edit: April 27, 2022, 04:18:22 am by Nord »

Offline Skybreaker

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #52 on: April 28, 2022, 01:46:33 am »
Thanks for the responses Nord. I eventually did find Rune mages.

Got a bug to report: Protector sells for a lot more than you can buy it for, creating an infinite money source. I know that some items can be sold for more than they can be bought for on lower difficulties, but I quickly jumped into a superhuman game to check and Protector costs $28000 to buy and sells for $44000.

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #53 on: April 29, 2022, 04:34:22 pm »
Thanks Nord.
Quote from: Nord link=topic=10233.msg145745
You can use pyrokinesys by any battlemage.
In that case:
a) It should probably appear on the "spells" tab of ufopedia
b) Should it not have "battlemage" as a requirement? Same for all spells?

Quote
[antidotes] Maybe later?
Antidotes are replaced by poisoncure it seems, so there is no "later" as I've had them for ages too. Glass spiders are the only things that anti-poison stuff is useful against so far.

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[revolver shotgun]It is not a bug, just all pellets missed and fly out of map, without hitting anything. Engine limitation.
I'm not convinced. It only happens with that particular gun and there's no shooting sound-effect either when it happens. Also, given the extremely limited range of that weapon, how are the pellets leaving the map anyway? But I don't know the engine, you do!

Quote
[missing projects] - Read ufopedia. You need HQ to research important projects.
Oh yes. I read that a month ago when I started this game.

Incidentally:
* Glass spiders are an interesting concept but *really* annoying to find. I've had missions go 80+ turns against them. Bughunt doesn't start as there are more than 3 left (I've upped it to 10 now in the script).

* I've fiddled with missionScripts.rul in the /mods/XCHR/rulesets directory to change all of the
Code: [Select]
executionOdds to be much lower. Unfortunately it seems to be getting ignored (to test, I deleted the entire script apart from the first 11 lines and stuff still appears). When does it get applied? New month? I really don't want to start a new game to reduce the geoscape-event-rate.

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #54 on: April 30, 2022, 07:51:56 pm »
* Tazers do kinetic damage; should be electric

* Balance: Archmage castle - I don't know if it's because I'm inept, but I've researched just about everything I can at this point (32%), then this turns up. There is -100% chance of me being able to even get past the courtyard. The knights have absurd shields and looking at the specs, 20points of armour too (on top of 50% kinetic resist and 80% melee), so just about no weapons will work against them either (and certainly no reasonable way to capture one). I tried a stand-off in my skymarshal but they eventually swarmed it and all I'd done was kill a single reaper.
The blessed footmen are similarly unreasonable given their armour is higher than almost all damage you're likely to do when you meet them. No idea how I'll catch one given their armour ignores all the stun weapons..

* Still no sign of a rune mage; just swarms of tedious legion with a hint of invader. :-(

Honestly, at this point I think I'll just give up; there's far too much grinding. :-( Sorry.

Offline Nord

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #55 on: May 01, 2022, 03:04:29 am »
* Tazers do kinetic damage; should be electric
No they should be not.
Quote
* Balance: Archmage castle - I don't know if it's because I'm inept, but I've researched just about everything I can at this point (32%), then this turns up. There is -100% chance of me being able to even get past the courtyard. The knights have absurd shields and looking at the specs, 20points of armour too (on top of 50% kinetic resist and 80% melee), so just about no weapons will work against them either (and certainly no reasonable way to capture one). I tried a stand-off in my skymarshal but they eventually swarmed it and all I'd done was kill a single reaper.
The blessed footmen are similarly unreasonable given their armour is higher than almost all damage you're likely to do when you meet them. No idea how I'll catch one given their armour ignores all the stun weapons..
Use spells. If you dont haave spells, dont try to beat Archmage.
Quote

* Still no sign of a rune mage; just swarms of tedious legion with a hint of invader. :-(

Honestly, at this point I think I'll just give up; there's far too much grinding. :-( Sorry.
Ok, i'll do something with it. Balance is a hardest part.

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #56 on: May 01, 2022, 04:14:38 pm »
Tazers - real-world they're electric. Game-wise it would make sense too given:
a) the current animation is electric (same as thundermage and the electric wand).
b) it would give an alternative way to stun things rather than relying on kinetic.

Quote
Use spells. If you dont have spells, dont try to beat Archmage.
It's a balance problem because the Archmage can appear before you have battlemages (or even the hint of them!). I've captured just about everything I've seen except the blessed-footmen group things because they only appeared on one mission (about a game-month ago) on a large UFO and I was massively outclassed, them being almost impervious to x-rifles after all, and all the stunning weapons.

---

Balance: Yeah, that's a tricky one. Designing difficulty is a completely different skillset from putting together all of the parts. You're clearly great at putting it all together, but (and I mean no offence), balance isn't your strongest area. ;-) (for my part: I absolutely cannot do art!).
And that's before we get to the difficultly of designing difficulty modes. Heh.

The good news is that it's a thing that can be learnt much more easily than art/programming and there's a ton of blog posts and youtube vids out there on balance and difficulty.

My suggestions:
Geoscape: Think up how many events there should be a month on the geoscape and how many of them the player should feel they need to do. I'd say 3-5 missions per month.
Then balance the appearance of different things so that the geoscape events ramp up to ... say ~10 things a month (middle difficulty), though again with the aim the player isn't doing all of them as missions. Maybe create a spreadsheet to help keep the number-of-events at whatever the target is by including the research/month filters and percentage chances (who doesn't love a good spreadsheet ;-) ).

Tactical: Not sure sure how to fix this one, but having to shoot out ~80 points of shield on a legion footman with an x-rifle is tedious (manipuls even more so!). And when there are ~10 of them on a ship and they're the primary antagonists for a sizeable number of months... :-o

Probably smaller squads to allow lower health on the enemies. Skymarshal is a massive 18 after all (do love the doors!) and I've had that forever. The downside to a larger squad is that you end up with more grind: Either more enemies or stronger enemies. At least with more enemies there are more dopamine hits as you take them all down. :-)

Think about the original XCOM: bullets kill Sectoids in 2-3 hits fairly reliably. Same with gillmen and harpoons, Plasma weapons kill Mutons in 2-3 etc. One or two more hits for the terrorists generally (cyberdiscs and bullets = :-( ). I'd suggest that's a good balancing target. I think it's similar with the newer (firaxis) xcom's.

My 2p. :-)

Offline Bonegnasher

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #57 on: May 01, 2022, 07:55:35 pm »
Balance
I haven't gotten that far myself, but as I understand it, you are trying to take on midgame & lategame enemies with early game/early midgame tech (you get X-rifles in the latter part of the first year) and regular operatives. That's not a balance issue, but the issue of either the RNG/bugs screwing you over or you missing something about the mod mechanics.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2022, 09:11:53 pm by Bonegnasher »

Offline xcommie

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #58 on: May 01, 2022, 11:13:54 pm »
I haven't gotten that far myself, but as I understand it, you are trying to take on midgame & lategame enemies with early game/early midgame tech (you get X-rifles in the latter part of the first year) and regular operatives. That's not a balance issue, but the issue of either the RNG/bugs screwing you over or you missing something about the mod mechanics.

I see where you're coming from and it's a good point, but I'm at about the same level as Skybreaker ( https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10233.msg145681.html#msg145681 ) both in time and tech-level. So if it's either the RNG or missing something, it's not that uncommon. The balance issue specific to the archmage is that it probably shouldn't appear that early. Easily solved with either an increase to the "firstAppears" months counter, or (better) add a research requirement for a tech that can handle it (battlemages?) or both (best).

Offline Bonakva

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Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5
« Reply #59 on: May 01, 2022, 11:23:34 pm »
Logic dictates that this is correct. The taser has small harpoons that conduct electricity, so if they don't penetrate the armor, the electricity probably won't work.